Nicholas Hellen, Transport Editor | Peter Conradi, in Djon | 24 November 2024 The Sunday Times link to article
It was the morning after the first heavy snowfall of the season but the trams of Dijon were running every three to four minutes regardless.
During Friday’s rush hour, the purple carriages glided effortlessly through the historic capital of Burgundy, eastern France.
“The tram just works. Personally, I have never come across any problems due to bad weather,” said Eric Florence, who takes the T2, the second of the city’s two tram lines, from his home for the four-mile journey to work at a bank. Rain or shine the journey takes 18 minutes.
Little wonder that ministers hope that Dijon’s success story could help fix Britain’s transport woes.
On Thursday, Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, will unveil an Integrated National Transport Strategy in Leeds, which with a population of 822,000 is the largest city in Europe without a rapid transport system.
She will say that Dijon, which has a population of 164,000, holds lessons for large towns and cities across Britain — and particularly places of comparable size such as Chester, Reading and York.
Every French urban area with a population above 150,000 has a tram or metro, yet 30 British cities above that size do not have a reliable rapid transit system.
Haigh first visited Dijon when she was shadow transport secretary and spent a day riding the buses and trams and talking to those who run them.
The network, which has 37 stops and covers 12.4 miles, was completed in 2012 and is due to be extended before the end of the decade, either by building a new line or extending the existing ones.
About 180,000 journeys are made on a typical day and private car usage is falling: at 53 per cent of trips in 2016, it is set to drop to 38 per cent by 2030.
A quarter of the cost of running the system is funded by fares: a basic €1.40 for a bus or tram ride and €1 for hiring a bike for an hour.
Another half comes from a levy on all local businesses that employ more than 11 people, with the remainder from the local authority.
The unique thing about Dijon is that a single body, Keolis Dijon Multimodalité, a private company, runs everything to do with transport, from trams, buses and bicycles to carsharing, transport for the disabled car parks and even car pounds.
Keolis also operates the Docklands Light Railway in London and Tramlink in Nottingham.
“It makes it possible to build much more intelligent, integrated transport policies because they’re more multimodal and adapt to people’s needs,” said Laurent Calvalido, its head. “It’s not just everyone in their own silo trying to maximise their own activity, sometimes to the detriment of others.”
Keolis Dijion One company runs Dijon’s entire transport system, includng trams, carshares and cycle hire
Haigh was so impressed by the model that once in government she sent Danny Williams, the official in charge of the government’s integrated national transport strategy, to the city for three days at the beginning of last month.
But Haigh has already been warned by Britain Remade that it costs twice as much (£87 million) to build a mile of tramway in Britain than in the rest of Europe, largely because of the excessive cost of moving utility cables.
Current and recent tram projects have caused concern. Britain Remade said it would cost £233 million for a one-mile tramline into the planned HS2 station at Curzon Street, Birmingham, adjusted for inflation, compared with £37 million a mile in Dijon.
The Birmingham project will take 13 years to complete compared with the four years it took in Dijon, which included two years of planning.
Meanwhile a judge-led inquiry found that the cost of an 11.5-mile tramline in Edinburgh doubled to more than £1 billion because of a “litany of avoidable failures”.
By comparison, in Dijon, the arrival of the tram coincided with measures to pedestrianise large sections of the city centre which residents said improved the quality of life.
“It is much less noisy than it used to be,” said Lionel Furré, 51, who lives in the centre of the city. “There used to be three lanes of traffic here. Now there is just one to make way for the tram.”